Congratulations to Donna Strickland, Gerard Mourou and Arthur Ashkin on winning the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics for ground-breaking inventions in the field of laser physics. Strickland and Mourou found a way to generate high-intensity, ultra-short optical pulses using chirped pulse amplification. Ashkin created optical tweezers that have had enormous impact on biological systems.

The award to Donna Strickland is especially notable on two accounts: firstly, she was a PhD student at the time of making her discovery, with the details forming her doctoral thesis; secondly, she is only the third woman to have received the Physics Nobel, after Marie Curie in1903 and Maria Goeppert-Mayer in 1963.